I track people who are disrupting the world of mobile technology. Non-conformists, innovators and agitators are this blog's unsung heroes, from entrepreneurs to scientists, to rebellious hackers. I'm the author of "We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous and the Global Cyber Insurgency", (Little Brown, 2012) which The New York Times called a "lively, startling book that reads as 'The Social Network' for group hackers." I recently relocated to Forbes' San Francisco office, and was previously Forbes' London bureau chief from 2008-12, interviewing British billionaires like Philip Green and controversial figures like Mohammed Al Fayed; I wrote last year's billionaires cover story on Russia's Yuri Milner, and have broken stories like the Facebook-Spotify partnership in 2011. Before all this I had stints at the BBC and as a radio journalist. You can watch me on 'The Daily Show' here. If you have a story idea or tip, e-mail me at polson@forbes.com or follow me on Twitter: parmy.

Meet The Smart Cup That Tracks What You Drink

After smart thermostats and smart forks, it was only a matter of time before someone put bluetooth and some sensors in one of the oldest tools known to humankind: the cup.

Pre-orders open today for the $99 Vessyl, a glass and polymer-coated cup that identifies and measure liquids poured into it. It also tracks what you’re drinking throughout the day. The idea is that over the course of a week or so, users can see how many calories or grams of sugar they’ve unwittingly imbibed without having to tally up any numbers themselves.

Much further down the line that data could be aggregated with activity information on a platform like AppleApple HealthKit, and be of great interest to a third party like a doctor or health insurer.

The Vessyl will retail for $199 after the first 60 days of preorders, but early customers will have to sit tight. The startup behind it, Mark One, doesn’t expect to ship its first batch of orders till early 2015.

“We want to gauge consumer interest,” says Vessyl inventor Justin Lee, when asked why he’s going public this early. “It’s a good time from within the area of consumer health, and tracking what we consume. Beverages are the number one source of unnoticed calories.”

Seven years in the making, the Vessyl appears to be among the first of its kind in the Internet of Things space. What does it look and feel like? It’s a little heavy thanks to the glass casing, and it comes with a magnetic lid that glides on and off. Yves Behar, the creative mind behind the Jawbone Up, designed this device and is Lee’s co-founder.

Lee recently brought an industrial prototype of the Vessyl to the Forbes San Francisco office, along with an array of drinks that we could pick from to prove the technology really would detect any liquid. I chose a can of StarbucksStarbucks double-shot espresso (seeing as it was 2pm), and Lee poured it into a separate prototype cup. The latest Vessyl prototypes with a display are being manufactured in China as we speak. It took a few seconds before the name of the drink came up on the cup’s iPhone app.

What’s attractive about the Vessyl is that it doesn’t need a smartphone nearby to be useful. “There’s memory and algorithms built into the cup,” says Lee. He claims the device can store drinking data for three days or more, before you need to open the app to synch with the cup and give a drinking tally.

The cup has a simple display that shows a rising and falling line of how hydrated you are. That’s a smart move by Lee. One common failing found in the plethora of activity trackers is that they don’t give wearers a simple value judgement on what they’re doing right or wrong.

To help get these kinds of suggestions right Vessyl appointed Mark Berman as his head of health, a physician who specializes in nutrition and obesity and “works on every single aspect of the product,” says Lee. “From size, to volume to user interface, what we’re displaying, how much, etc.”

“We collect a lot of data about what you’re consuming and we have to make sure we’re presenting the data to people in a way that is clear and that is actionable,” says Lee.

Data about what we ingest is widely thought to be a much better indicator of health than the activity data you’d get from something like a Fitbit. If Vessyl catches on with consumers, doctors and health insurance companies could be especially interested in hooking into its platform.

That could play into a wider trend we’ve identified as the Quantified Other, a step forward from the so-called quantified self movement. It sees a raft of third parties, from employers to doctors to marketers, moving to collect and eventually aggregate the data we provide to the growing number of smart devices around us to get a clearer picture of us as individuals or groups.

Lee says his company is looking carefully at the possibility of working with third parties in the health provider and health payer space. “We want to make our products as accessible as possible so that people can have those benefits,” he says, adding that Berman is “the point man” on those discussions.

Might we see a smart bowl or smart plate somewhere down the line? “The company is specifically focused on automatically tracking what we consume in a natural way,” Lee says. “We have a strong pipeline and there’s definitely more to come.”

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